At 18, Kramer, son of a Frankfurt businessman, was a soldier lying in a trench near Verdun. He would later be locked up in an insane asylum for refusing to obey orders. After successfully fleeing that institution, his architecture studies took him to Munich and gained him entrée into diverse intellectual circles. Because of his left-wing views, he was known to many as “Red Ferdinand”. But this didn’t stop him from designing furniture for a friend who was a baron. He was disappointed by the Bauhaus, where he studied for a short time, but he did make friends there with artists including Gerh a rd Marcks. Kramer took up work on the “New Frankfurt” under City Architect Ernst May in the mid- 1920s, designing buildings made of concrete, iron and glass, including an old people’s home (together with Mart Stam), a central garage with petrol station and a few apartment blocks with standardized floor plans measuring 50 square metres “for subsistence-level living”. His main job was to come up with suitable furnishings and household goods for the new municipal buildings, including the kind of streamlined, angular, type-based furniture that would be both aff o rdable and functional (to be made by unemployed cabinetmakers). Kramer, one of the key proponents – along with Erich Dieckmann, Otto Haesler, Karl Schneider and others – of the new rational domestic lifestyle outside of the Bauhaus, also developed small, high-performance coal stoves, as well as lamps, door-handles, space-saving sitzbaths and furnishings for city-run kindergartens.